eBook News

Suddenly have your Author page on Amazon all in italics?  Wondering why your beautiful book looks odd on the Look Inside the Book?  Check in here---see if we've blogged about it. We try to keep you current on the latest current events in the eBook world.  

SHAKEN: STORIES FOR JAPAN

SHAKEN is a collaborative effort; an anthology of 20 short stories contributed by top-selling authors from around the globe, edited by 2011 Edgar Best-Novel nominee Timothy Hallinan.

6/10: UPDATE: SHAKEN is now #10 in the Kindle Store for Fiction->Short Stories and #17 in Books->Literature & Fiction->Short Stories!!

I'm really proud to announce SHAKEN: STORIES FOR JAPAN. SHAKEN is a collaborative effort; an anthology of 20 short stories contributed by top-selling authors from around the globe, edited by 2011 Edgar Best-Novel nominee Timothy Hallinan. This book is being published by the Japan America Society of Southern California, with 100%--absolutely 100%--of the proceeds going directly to earthquake and tsunami victims in Japan. The authors, the editor, and my Crew all donated our services to bring this book to fruition.

It's going to be available on Amazon sometime today, I hope--and I sincerely hope that everyone who reads this, and sees the blogs and tweets about it around the Net will rush to Amazon to buy it. Please tell your friends--tell anyone you know. As soon as I have a link, I'll post it here and I'll be tweeting it, too.

This collection was born out of the writers' concern for the people in the disaster zone. SHAKEN: STORIES FOR JAPAN is an attempt by writers to pool their talents to help people in need, as musicians and actors so often do.

The book contains original stories by Brett Battles, Cara Black, Vicki Doudera, Dianne Emley, Dale Furutani, Timothy Hallinan, Stefan Hammond, Rosemary Harris, Naomi Hirahara, Wendy Hornsby, Ken Kuhlken, Debbi Mack, Adrian McKinty, I.J. Parker, Gary Phillips, Hank Phillippi Ryan, Jeffrey Siger, Kelli Stanley, C.J. West, and Jeri Westerson. As a group, these authors have won every mystery award there is and sold hundreds of thousand of copies. They're all working at the top of their games in this volume. SHAKEN; STORIES FROM JAPAN is art for heart's sake, and the purchase price will help those who are struggling to repair, or at least soothe, these terrible losses.

SHAKEN
SHAKEN: Stories for Japan is a collaborative effort of over 20 writers to raise money for survivors and victims of Japan's devastating Tsunami.
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Did Lulu and Bookbaby Really Lose Their Bite At the Apple?

Rumors are swirling that Bookbaby and Lulu have lost their distribution deals with Apple's iBookstore.

A little birdie tells me--the same little birdie that alerted me to the Kobo deal some months back-that both Bookbaby and Lulu have lost their status as Approved Apple Content Aggregators. Now, no word on this, overtly, is forthcoming from Apple, of course; but a quick check of Apple's approved list of Aggregators shows that Lulu and Bookbaby are glaringly absent.

Sources say that Apple's sick of dealing with content upload problems, and is paring down their exposure to Aggregators to the companies consistently delivering quality content. Other sources state that while Apple claims that it wants to "own" the ebook space, it also has no desire to own Amazon's staffing requirements, put in place to deal with the Niagara of self-publishing authors. For the purposes of this post, we'll ignore the cognitive dissonance those two goals invoke. So for now, only a very few channels remain for self-publishers and indies to get their content on Apple--Ingram, InScribe Digital, InGrooves, and Smashwords...and there's heavy money being bet on Smashwords going the way of Bookbaby soon. The lesson here? Before deciding on distribution deals (in the biz, "distro"), make sure you've signed with a firm that can bring something to the table...and last through dinner.

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Exclusive Kobo-InGrooves Deal Announced

Did Kobo's pricing discounts really affect you?

Everyone reading this news article has probably read or heard about the furor over discounting at Kobo (an ePub distributor, e-bookseller, device-maker and reading application maker), and how it's affected Amazon pricing and commissions.  Many authors have removed their titles from Kobo, not wanting Kobo's discounting to reduce their Amazon prices, and thus their commission structure.  But customers distributing their ePubs through InGrooves no longer have to worry about that, and are getting a better commission structure through InGrooves!

This past week, Kobo executives agreed to provide commissions to InGrooves' distribution partners that exceed their normal commission structure for self-published authors.  Instead of the 50/50% deal that is normally offered, InGrooves' authors will receive a 70/30% commission structure, resulting in a net royalty to them of 65%--a 20% increase.  In addition, Kobo has agreed to cease discounting without the express permission of the author, eliminating the Amazon-pricing "Death Spiral" that has recently caused significant income loss to Kindle authors. 

Contact me if you need further information about this development. 

 

Update:  This article no longer relevant as of year-end, 2011. 

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